What is love?

I think everybody has their own definition of what love truly is, but can it be contained to a mere definition? Personally, the main technical requirements of love would be trust, respect and communication. But love isn’t a technical thing – it’s an emotional thing and we can’t express linguistically how we truly feel; it’s not possible.

I suppose your basic understanding of love would come from your childhood and the love that you receive from your parents. This love is supposed to be the only unconditional love, a love that will remain constant whatever you do. If you have a normal childhood experience, you’ll probably experience a very basic type of love. This is a love that wants the best for you, wants to look after and protect you, and will always love you. It is a love that makes them spend time with you, want to know about your life and to really just strive for the best for you and your future. You might not recognise it as these things, but basically if you were sheltered, fed and watered, given an education and kept safe, then you have experienced a basic form of love. True, there will be fights, arguments and door-slamming, but this does not take away the love. The love will still be there when you resolve the argument. The typical family relationship relies on the three technical requirements of love in order to function in this way. You need to be able to trust your parents and siblings, otherwise it wouldn’t work. Your love would be dependent on whether they follow through on what they say or not, and this isn’t a constant love. You need to be able to respect your parents, to respect what they say and to accept their authority over you until you become an adult or move out. If you don’t respect them, there won’t be a mutual understanding of boundaries, and you will lose their trust and respect if you break these boundaries. Finally, communication is pretty vital in most relationships, and this is true in a family sense. If you never speak to your parents, then you won’t trust or respect them fully, and you’ll never really know them or what kind of people they are. They won’t know you either unless you open up to them and share your life with them. This opens the door for respect and trust.

This might seem like a fairly scientific approach to what love is, but trust me; I’m no more a scientist than Barbie is. Love is a very complicated matter, and cannot be expressed with mere words. If you were to ‘Wikipedia’ the definition of “love”, you would encounter a very complex definition – “Love is any of a number of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection and attachment. The word love can refer to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from generic pleasure to intense interpersonal attraction. This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.”

And thus, love cannot really be defined. It cannot be compared to other emotional states, although we try. It has been said that people who are in love display signs of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder when it comes to their significant other, rendering us obsessive about them. This would probably define a “crush” or fancying someone, too. We feel attached to somebody, and a sense of bonding and unity is formed, hence it is so hard to stop loving somebody – it feels like you are missing a part of yourself – the part that they filled.

When people talk about their loved one, they can sometimes be seen to be wearing “rose-tinted glasses”, ignoring the blatant flaws and loving them anyway. That’s what love is – you see the flaw, you accept it and you appreciate it. When you realize that you love them regardless of everything you hate about them, you know that it’s love. Imagining yourself sitting side-by-side with your partner on rocking chairs in your mid-nineties is another aspect; long-term love. Love isn’t just a fling; it isn’t hopping into bed with somebody. It’s not a whirlwind romance. Love is about really getting to know somebody, learning everything about them and appreciating that. It’s not about how long you’ve been together or how much money they have to offer. It doesn’t even matter how fertile they are – it’s all about your connection and whether you work as a couple and could work for a long time. Love isn’t always exciting and adventurous – it’s sustaining the feelings during the mundane and boring times. I’m proud that my parents have managed to remain fully in love for twenty-five years, and I can vouch for the fact that their life isn’t always exciting. They have kids to look after, so don’t always get a chance to spend time alone, but they’re still in love even when doing the dishes, walking the dog or making dinner.

So love is sustainable, with care and attention. Communication, respect and trust make up the perfect foundations for a strong relationship, but don’t get swept along by all of the things that love is portrayed to be. Love isn’t always perfect, it’s not always easy and it doesn’t always work out – but it is something that only you can feel and only you can know when it’s right and when it’s wrong. But when it’s right, love has the ability to overwhelm, to blind and to create magic – it’s not a force to be reckoned with. As Nicholas Sparks says, “"Love is more than three words mumbled before bedtime. Love is sustained by action, a pattern of devotion in the things we do for each other every day.